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THURSDAY, June 14, 2012 — How much can you tell about a person just by looking at his or her shoes?

Quite a bit, says a new study, which found that shoes alone provide accurate clues to personality traits and political beliefs.

From Sex and the City style maven Carrie Bradshaw and her Manolo Blahnik obsession, to scruffy punks and their Dr. Martens boots, shoes “serve a practical purpose, and also serve as nonverbal cues with symbolic messages,” write researchers from the University of Kansas and Wellesley College in their study, “Shoes as a Source of First Impressions,” to be published in the August issue of the Journal of Research in Personality.

Researchers were interested in how accurately people can judge others by glimpsing their shoes. Now, before there’s any tut-tutting about the shallowness of psychological research these days, think about how often we make snap judgments about people based on limited information. Who hasn’t quickly glanced at someone, decided he or she looked dangerous, and scuttled off in the other direction? We employ these slivers of information beyond personal safety, using them to intuit people’s politics, racial biases, and sexual orientation, argue the authors.

Shoes as 'Static Cue' to Personality

Most previous studies examining the effect of physical appearance on judgment have used a mixture of so-called “dynamic cues,” such as facial expressions and posture, and “static cues” like hairstyle and clothing. "We know relatively little about accuracy based solely on static cues,” the researchers write. The current study, they argue, fills a “gap in the literature” by focusing on just one static cue: footwear.

To test their prediction that people can “accurately evaluate shoe owners’ basic demographics, such as social economic status, gender, and age solely based on a picture of their shoes,” researchers photographed footwear from 208 college students enrolled in an intro psychology course at the University of Kansas. The students completed online questionnaires to assess their personality traits and relationship attachment style, as well as provided demographic data like their age, gender, and family income.

The observers — 63 undergraduates — viewed 10 shoes on a computer monitor. Based solely on seeing the shoes, the observers rated the personality, attachment style, political ideology, and demographics of each shoe’s owner.

Immaculate Shoes May Mean Fear of Rejection

After crunching through the data, researchers found that the observers were largely accurate in gauging the gender, personality traits, and political beliefs of the shoe owners. Some of the eye-opening findings include:

There’s a correlation between shoe owners with attachment anxiety and shoes that are in really good shape. (Attachment anxiety is associated with a fear of being abandoned and rejected, and these people may keep their shoes in tip-top shape to help avoid rejection, the study authors surmise.)

Liberal politics was negatively correlated with attractive shoes, shoes with pointy toes, shoes in good repair, and expensive shoes.

People who wear high-tops or masculine looking shoes like boots tend to be less agreeable. (Agreeableness is one of the Big Five personality traits psychologists use to define personality and is associated with friendliness, generosity, helpfulness, and modesty.)

But observers weren’t always accurate in their judgments. For example, people assumed that owners of attractive and well-kept shoes were more conscientious, (another Big Five trait that’s associated with self-discipline, carefulness, thoroughness, and deliberation), but that didn’t turn out to be the case.

So, can you judge a person by his or her shoes? It depends on what you’re judging. What’s more, as the authors write, beware trying to make such judgments about people outside of what social psychologists refer to as your “ingroup” (essentially, the social group of which you are a member and loyal to). As they write, “the interpretability of clothing and shoes is almost certainly limited to ingroup members — cross-cultural interpretation of personality from styles of dress might be wildly inaccurate.”